Rabbi Warns Against ’emotional Fix’ on Such Issues As Holocaust. Israel

Jews should refrain from seeking “a quick emotional fix” on issues such as the Holocaust and defense of Israel, and instead should concentrate on their religious, cultural and intellectual traditions, a leading Jewish historian and rabbi said here Sunday night.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of Englewood, New Jersey, Adjunct Professor of History at Columbia University, told some 200 Jewish educators and Jewish Federation personnel assembled for the first annual Philip W. Lown Conference on Jewish Education at Hebrew College here: “The American Jewish community has organized itself around its Zionism, its anti anti-Semitism, and its social service institutions, such as hospitals.

“This is an anti-intellectual, program-oriented approach” which organizes Jews as “an army ready to do battle,” he said, warning that the Jewish communities’ “raison d’etre could possibly collapse if Israel acquired peace and the Russians released those Jews wishing to emigrate.”

Hertzberg said that 40 percent of all Judaic studies courses given at American universities today relate to the Holocaust. “This speaks of a need for a quick emotional fix unrelated to any intellectual tradition,” he said. “The American Jewish community has watched its own erosion and bets its survival on the Israel connection,” he concluded.

Hertzberg took issue with the call from Houston over the weekend, for Reform Jews to proselytize “the un-churched,” who might otherwise fall victim to cults such as the People’s Temple in Guyana. That call came from Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, speaking before the 120-member board of the organization. “I find it hard to believe that these wandering souls are waiting for upper middle class Reform Judaism,” Hertzberg observed. Hertzberg is past president of the American Jewish Congress.